Believing that Minecraft was "the single most important application" for Oculus Rift, Oculus VR's CTO John Carmack spent 18 months negotiating and pleading to Mojang and Microsoft to make it happen.
Speaking at the Oculus Connect conference, Carmack revealed that he had made a personal plea to Markus "Notch" Persson to greenlight a Rift version of Minecraft before Facebook acquired Oculus VR. The Facebook acquisition only made matters worse as Notch was one of the most vocal critics of the deal. Carmack was able to win Notch over eventually, but by then Microsoft had acquired Mojang and Notch was no longer in the picture.
To make matters worse, Microsoft started using Minecraft prominently to promote its own HoloLens augmented reality headset.
But in the end Carmack was able to convince Microsoft and Mojang to let him develop a VR version of Minecraft as long as they get to own the fruits of his labor for free. "Microsoft actually got me GitHub access to the Minecraft: Pocket Edition code base," said Carmack. "But we signed a contract that our lawyers said was terrible. 'They own everything you do. John, you're basically working for Microsoft when you're working on this.'"
That was eight months ago and since then Oculus and Microsoft negotiated the terms of the deal. Finally, an agreement was signed just a few hours before Carmack's keynote, thanks to a meeting between the two company's CEO's, Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella.
"I've called this my grail," said Carmack, arguing that Minecraft is "the single most important application that we can have to ensure we have an army of fanatic, passionate supporters that will advocate why VR is great. It's part of this infinite playability that our current ecosystem is missing."